What's Wrong With Kansas?
A Conversation With Thomas Frankwww.dissidentvoice.org
June 14, 2004

Editor's Note: Dissident Voice considers
Thomas Frank one of the finest and wittiest writers on politics and culture
today. He is a founding editor of
The Baffler
magazine, and author of the must-read books One Market Under God: Extreme
Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy and The
Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip
Consumerism. His latest book is
What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
(Metropolitan Books, 2004). By far the best and most insightful book I've
read in a couple of years. Frank uses Kansas as a metaphor for the rest of
the country in order to examine why so many working and middle-class
Americans consistently act against their own self-interests. The following
is a publisher's interview with Thomas Frank. Thanks to Henry Holt and Co.

When
you ask, What's the Matter With Kansas?, do you just mean the rectangular
state in the middle of the country, or is Kansas symbolic of something
larger?

In the
book I do discuss certain events and personalities in the actual state of
Kansas, but I also use “Kansas” as a metaphor for the U.S.A. According to
journalistic convention, Kansas is the distilled essence of the country, the
very heart of America. It’s a perfect microcosm, the place we look when we
want to ponder the big question of who we are as a people. Incidentally,
this is not only a journalistic convention, but a marketing one, too: Kansas
is dead-average in so many statistical ways that it is a natural choice for
test-marketers looking to see how some new product—a just-invented
McDonald’s sandwich, say—will play in Peoria.

And
so what is the matter with Kansas?

The same
thing that’s been the matter with America for so many years: the culture
wars. The cloud of inexhaustible right-wing outrage that hovers over so much
of the country. Kansas, like many places in America, once had a tradition of
progressivism and outright radicalism. Today, though, like many other
places, the state’s political center just seems to move farther to the right
in response to events. During the Nineties the state erupted in a sort of
right-wing populist revolt, tossing out its old-school pragmatic leaders and
replacing them with the most conservative Republicans available. It made
national headlines when anti-abortion activists descended in massive numbers
on Wichita in 1991, and it made world headlines when its State Board of
Education took up the battle against evolution in 1999. Today Kansas is the
sort of place where the angry, suspicious worldview typified by Fox News or
the books of Ann Coulter is a common part of everyday life. So I went there
to study the indignant conservative mindset up close.

The
reason I say there’s something “the matter” with all this is that, in
becoming more and more conservative, Kansas is voting against its own
economic interests. Large parts of the state are in deep economic crisis—in
many cases a crisis either brought on or worsened by the free-market
policies of the Republican party—and yet the state’s voters insist on
re-electing the very people who are screwing them, running up colossal
majorities for George Bush, lowering taxes and privatizing and deregulating,
even when these things are manifestly unhealthy for the state.

After
the last election we heard a lot about a cultural conflict between the “red
states” that voted for George W. Bush and the “blue states” that voted for
Al Gore. Is this what you’re getting at with your book?

Yes, but
not in the usual way. When some pundit starts talking about the red states
versus the blue, what they’re usually trying to do is associate president
Bush with the humble, “heartland” values of the Midwest and thus give him
the grassroots legitimacy that, as a minority president, he does not enjoy.
(At the same time, they are usually also trying to smear his opponents by
associating them with the corruption and snob tastes of the Eastern cities.)
My own take is different. I point out that the “heartland” isn’t that
simple; that you have corruption and snob tastes in Republican Kansas just
like you do in New York, and that in certain cases, the Republicanism of
these salt-of-the-earth red states is downright self-destructive. This is a
book about good people in hard times who, despite noble intentions, have
made terrible choices. While I liked many of the conservatives I met in
Kansas, and while I have a deep affection for the state—after all, it’s my
home state—this is not one of those fake-populist books celebrating the
nobility of the eternal heartland or praising Wal-Mart or supplying the
recipe for grandma’s special casserole.

Your
title, What's the Matter With Kansas?, comes from a famous 1896 essay
by William Allen White. What statement are you trying to make by echoing
White?

When he
wrote the essay, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”, William Allen White was a
conservative editor of a small-town newspaper who was outraged by the wave
of Populist sentiment that was then so powerful in Kansas. In the 1890s,
remember, Populism was a movement of the left, fighting “the elite” by
demanding things like a federal farm program, national ownership of the
railroads, fair play for labor unions, an income tax, and a fiat currency.
(All things which were partially achieved in later years.) In his essay,
White angrily berated these radical Kansans for making the state look bad in
the eyes of big money and thus for bringing economic ruin. It was a powerful
piece of work, and it became an instant classic, reprinted in huge numbers
by the McKinley campaign for use against the Democratic and Populist
candidate, William Jennings Bryan.

Today’s
conservative Kansas rebels are politically the exact opposite of the rebels
of 1896, trying to reverse or destroy the achievements of their ancestors.
They most definitely are bringing ruin on the state. And yet while they do
so they constantly use the class-war language of populism, always depicting
Republicanism as a movement of regular folks overthrowing the haughty
impositions of the “liberal elite.” The worst offender in this regard is
George Bush himself, who complains about being the victim of liberal-elite
snobbery even while he works to make the country’s real elite more of an
elite than ever. His political managers, meanwhile, love to compare their
man to the pro-business William McKinley, the guy who beat the original
Populists, even while they endlessly salute the “heartland” values of
red-state America.

So how
could I not use White’s title? The historical parallels and reversals are
just too many to resist.

One of the words you use a
lot in the book is “backlash.” You talk about “the Great Backlash,”
“backlash conservatism,” and a “backlash mentality.” What do you mean by
this?

By “backlash” I mean
populist conservatism of the kind pioneered in the Sixties by George Wallace
and Richard Nixon, perfected by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and
crafted into an entertainment form by Fox News. Instead of selling
conservative politics on economic grounds, it imagines conservatism as a
revolt of the little people against a high and mighty liberal elite. Its
object is to fight back against artists who dip crosses in urine, Hollywood
stars who wear outrageous clothes, Ivy League journalists who slant the
news, and snob judges who remove Ten Commandments monuments from the parks,
and so on. The “Great Backlash” refers to the long ascendancy of this style
of conservatism, ever since 1968. The “backlash mentality” refers to the
culture of the movement, to the way its members view the world we live in.

The backlash is so
commonplace and so universal today that it’s sometimes difficult to remember
how strange and how historically recent it is. Before the Sixties, the
working class was something conservatives wanted nothing to do with; today
conservatives talk about the honest, hard-working people of “red America” as
though they were the GOP’s natural constituency, while ignoring the nuts and
bolts of economic issues.

At times in the book you
describe the backlash as a cultural phenomenon. What are some of its main
characteristics?

The basic cultural
earmark of the backlash is its constant use of the language of class
conflict. It understands liberalism as the imposition of an elite, not as
something constructed over the decades by working-class people, minorities,
and environmentalists. Liberals are parasites, it insists, pressing their
idle schemes down on the hard-working world. Another peculiarity of the
backlash is its fantasy of victimhood. Populist conservatives understand
themselves as people with a terrible grievance against society, against a
liberal order that insults them, discriminates against them, and even
persecutes them. They are chronically outraged, offended by everything, but
also convinced that they are powerless to change the world. Finally, they
are deeply anti-intellectual, hostile not only to elite college teachers but
to the professions generally and, beyond that, suspicious of most complex
explanations for how the world works.

As I note in the book,
this is a curious set of beliefs for a faction that has enjoyed such
spectacular political success in the last thirty years. So if we want to
understand why America has moved so sharply to the right since the
Sixties—and why it has pushed the world in the same direction—I believe we
must start by examining the backlash.

You say that you have a
special, personal insight into the backlash mentality. How so?

I grew up in suburban
Kansas City, a place where the backlash grievance is sometimes second
nature, and as a schoolboy in the Seventies and Eighties I embraced the
backlash worldview with the zealotry of a true believer. I was a Reagan
youth. So I believe I understand the sense of frustration from which the
backlash arises and the fundamentally decent democratic impulses—the
hair-trigger suspicion of “elites,” for example—that it builds upon. My
subsequent personal experiences, such as my later turn to the left, are also
why I persist in believing that many backlash voters can be brought back to
the liberal fold. That is, they could if there were any politicians out
there willing to make the effort.

How
did liberals let all this happen, and what can they do to remedy the
situation?

There is
no doubt that liberals bear a lot of the blame for the backlash. Back in the
Sixties and Seventies, Democratic Party leaders decided to turn their backs
on the working-class voters who until then had been the party’s central
constituency, and to try to find a new constituency in groups like college
students, environmentalists, and so on. They called this the “New Politics,”
and it was a terrible mistake. Among other things, it is one of the sources
of the “liberal elite” stereotype, in a historical sense. And while there
have been numerous Democrats who have tried to resurrect the alliance with
the working class over the years, the dominant, Clinton wing of the party
clings to this failed strategy. They essentially agree with the Republicans
on economic issues, write off the working class, and try instead to win the
votes (and the campaign contributions) of educated, professional people by
taking liberal stands on social issues. Their idea of politics is a war of
enlightened CEOs versus backwards CEOs.

This
strategy has been disastrous in the extreme. While stripping away any
economic reason for working people to vote Democratic, it has simultaneously
played into the “liberal elite” stereotype which is the Republicans’
strongest weapon. The result is what you see around you: Republicans talk
constantly about class grievances, albeit in a coded and inverted way, while
Democrats never bring it up at all, desperately trying to prove their
“centrist” bona fides. What liberals must do to beat the backlash, it seems
obvious to me, is to resurrect old-fashioned, upper-case-P populism, and to
wage non-coded, non-inverted class war. They must at the very minimum
counter Republican appeals to social class with their own appeals to social
class.

In
your other books you have written about the use of countercultural language
by the advertising industry (The Conquest of Cool, 1997) and the use
of liberationist language by Wall Street and corporate management (One
Market Under God, 2000). What connects those books to this one?

All three
books are about the colossal abuse of the language of democracy in the
aftermath of the Sixties. And all three are about the many bizarre cultural
inversions of the world we live in: Consumerism as nonconformity; Wall
Street as an ally of the common man; the CEO as Deadhead—and now, the
Republicans as the party of the working class.

In other words, they’re all
about the sheer weirdness of our times. We inhabit a nation where the
culture screams constantly about how rebellious and nonconformist and Xtreme
we are, but where the politics constantly move to the right. My larger point
is that these two aspects of our times are connected to each other; that our
pseudo-revolutionary culture in some way helps to generate our reactionary
politics, and vice-versa. We talk a lot about both parts of American life,
but always separately—pondering one in the front pages and the other in the
“Business” or “Style” section. My object is to consider both at the same
time, to point out that these two aspects of America thrive symbiotically on
one another’s excesses. The white-collar rebels shock and annoy the pious;
the blue-collar Republicans are duly shocked and annoyed; and they vote to
shower even more power, more tax cuts, more deregulation, on the
white-collar rebels whom they despise so deeply. This topsy-turvy system
works.